Dear Lance 
Lance Armstrong Has Something to Get Off His Chest
He doesn't use performance-enhancing drugs, he insists, no matter what his critics in the European press and elsewhere say. And yet the accusations keep coming. How much scrutiny can the two-time Tour de France winner stand?
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The day after we talked, Lance spoke gratis to a crowd of 1,250 at the Austin Convention Center. It was the yearly Ride for the Roses gala, part of an entire weekend of cancer fundraising and races sponsored by the Lance Armstrong Foundation that would raise some $2 million, most of which goes to medical research grants. The gala was a smash: Avid cyclist Robin Williams gabbed and Shawn Colvin sang. At one point emcee Harry Smith, the CBS correspondent, said, "Lance does something to those of us who know him and those of us who admire him." The room was packed with people who look on Lance as a savior, a guy who gives credibility to the idea that they are survivors and not victims, when often they feel the other way around. Three women received Carpe Diem awards for being, like Lance, living symbols of living with cancer. Perhaps the most compelling was Cara Dunne-Yates, a blind Paralympic medal winner in tandem bicycling with a mesmerizing message of hope, even as she prepared for another round of chemo. Lance followed her to say good-night and appeared genuinely moved: "Stories like this are what get me on the bike every day and get us out there." Someone in the audience whooped and another shouted, "Tear it up, Lance!"
Does He or Doesn't He?
It's impossible to say. I talked with four people—two French, one American, one Irish; a doctor, a trainer, and two journalists—who say, unequivocally, yes. They have no proof—no needles, no photos, no witnesses, no positive drug tests—but think he's the most visible of all the doped riders who are ruining cycling today. Their assumptions—Lance is only human, and humans just can't ride like that. Everybody does it, therefore Lance does it—are based on what one of them calls "an intimate knowledge of the sport" as well as a sense of Lance himself as a guy who would do anything to win. I also talked with many more people—doctors, journalists, mostly Americans but also an Italian, an Englishmen, and a Spaniard—who say, unequivocally, no. They say he doesn't need drugs and that he is saving cycling.
Lance has, of course, always denied using drugs. In his book he wrote, "Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling . . . some teams and riders feel . . . they have to do it to stay competitive within the peloton. I never felt that way." In truth, though, he has sometimes been evasive about the subject. In December, during the early days of the France 3 investigation, he wrote on his Web site, "Activ-o-something is new to me. Before this ordeal I had never heard of it, nor had my teammates." Yet Actovegin was part of the doctor's medical bag all through the Tour and an acknowledged use was riders' skin abrasions. Could Lance really never have heard of it? "This doesn't make sense," I e-mailed him in early June when he was in Spain racing. "You're a guy who knows everything that goes on around him." He e-mailed back, "I cannot know everything that might be in our doctor's medicine kit."
He has also always downplayed the extent of doping in cycling. He told me, for example, that he found even Voet's lower estimate, that 60 percent were doping, "hard to believe." Nor has he been supportive of whistle-blowers like Christophe Bassons, a rider in the 1999 Tour who broke the riders' code of silence when he repeatedly said that many were still doping after the Festina scandal. When he heard Bassons' comments, Lance said, "What he's said is not good for him or his team, his sponsor, and cycling. . . . he can't speak like that, because sponsors will walk away from the sport." Bassons soon quit the Tour, hounded out by fellow riders.
"I'm skeptical about all these guys," says the Sunday Times' Walsh, who this year won two Sportswriter of the Year awards in Britain. "But Lance is being held up by cycling as a symbol of the sport's rejuvenation. Maybe he is the best, but you've got to wonder if he's the best of the pack of doped riders." Lance's alleged doping is the subject, Walsh says, of a story he has been working on for a long time, as yet unpublished. He has no proof that Lance is a doper but, like many others, bases his theory on wisdom earned from many years covering the sport, including stories he has heard. Another Lance basher is a doctor—he requested anonymity—who works for an American team and who is certain Lance is doing all the major banned substances: "There's no way he's not 'on the program.'" And your proof, I asked? "I have none. No video, no paper trail. It's impossible to penetrate the system—the code of silence perpetuates itself."
Pierre Ballester was a cycling writer for L'Equipe for twelve years who says he got so disillusioned with all the doping that he quit in February. "I'm fed up with all the liars, cheaters, and junkies," he told me. And he had despaired especially about Lance (whom he liked and had interviewed several times, even visiting at his Austin home) and his superhuman performances, which he believed were drug-enhanced. "He's not a machine," says Ballester. "He's not a mutant. I knew him, but I don't know him anymore." Ballester has no proof.
At the heart of the accusers' argument is an oft-repeated mantra, "Nobody can win a big event in cycling without doping." Ballester said it to me several times. Even Lance, I asked? "I leave the deductions to you," he replied. That kind of thinking makes coach Chris Carmichael furious. "They had that same mentality back at Salem, Massachusetts," he says, "and they burned a lot of innocent people. Lance doesn't use banned substances or illegal drugs. He never has, and he never will." Two of his former Motorola doctors, Pedro Celaya and Max Testa, also are angry about the allegations. "This is a lie," says Celaya. "I'm working this job twenty years. I've never seen anybody like Lance. His mind, his body—it's really incredible." Whittle of procycling says, "I don't think he'd be shocked at the thought of people using illegal substances. He knows it's going on. But that doesn't mean he's doing it." Lance's friend Korioth remembers, "I never saw any record or indication of him wanting to do it. Beyond the health reasons for not doing it, Lance has to say, 'What does something like that do to my reputation?' US Postal would drop him. He'd lose his sponsorships. He has everything to lose and nothing to gain."
Not surprisingly, Lance questions what his accusers have to gain. He saves his harshest words for Walsh—"I'd ask you to read his columns over time and see where he is coming from," Lance e-mailed me. "You will see that, in my opinion, he plays it fast and loose with the facts and that he has reported things that are absolutely false"— and Ballester—L'Equipe "refused to bring him to the Tour," he wrote, "because even they questioned his credibility on this issue." (For the record, Rouet says there was never a problem with Ballester's credibility.) Lance reiterated his mantra, "I've made the most unequivocal statements I can make about all the doping allegations. I've also been tested many, many times and my urine has now been tested from the 2000 Tour and it was clean. If that's not evidence enough, I sincerely do not know what is."
As Lance knows all too well, it's impossible to prove a negative, and throughout the France 3 investigation he has claimed to be a clean rider. But did you, I asked him at the Hula Hut, ever do EPO back in the old days? "No," he said. "I've admitted doing it, because I did it when I was sick. I think the raging years, the years it may have been a problem, were the years I was trading stock and sitting in Austin, hanging out at the Hula Hut." But why, I asked, wouldn't you use something that is, in your own words, "absolutely undetectable and unbelievably beneficial"? "It's pretty scary," he replied. "People have died from that. I'm not lining up for that job."
"I'll Be Hard to Beat"
For most of Lance's life the odds have been stacked against him. Now, heading into the 2001 Tour, they're 5-2 in his favor. "I guess Lance will win a third Tour de France," says Ballester, "because he's on top and he doesn't have any big rivals. He's better at mountains, flat stages, and time trials. Apart from an accident, no one will beat him." Lance, as you might guess, is pretty confident himself. "I don't know if I'll win, but I'll be hard to beat," he said in April, on the verge of vetting the Alps again. "I'm two months ahead, right now, of where I was last year." If he wins, he might even get some validation from new urine and blood EPO tests, though both detect drug use only within the previous three days (if Tour officials are to be believed, post-Festina testing and penalties have made a small dent in the abuse problem). Flawed or not, the new tests are a start, says L'Equipe's Rouet: "You can't have perfectly clean sports, but I think if Lance wins again with the tests, it will change the feelings of the fans and the press." Except, of course, those who believe he and everyone else in the peloton have moved on to other, undetectable superdrugs.
Lance is on top of the world; what could possibly motivate him anymore? Well, there's rubbing the Gallic nose into the pavement again, always a trusty pleasure. And beating his ex-teammate and former close friend Kevin Livingston, who is now racing for archrival Ullrich's team. Lance would love to win a third Tour in a row, another step in a hinted-at goal of being the only man to ever win six. The truth is, Lance is one of those maniac champions who will always feel he has something to prove. Those who love him think he has shown enough heroism for one lifetime. Those who don't say that will never be enough.
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